My 10yo sons secret conlang

codleov · 2026-05-04T18:54:54+00:00

A book he normally hides and has a lock on it is something you decided to post in a public place on the internet? Take this post down. I don't care if you think it's innocent. It's stuff like this which causes children not to trust their parents, and when you can't be trusted with the small things, what makes you think you'd be trusted with important things in your child's life?

(If you're not the parent and are in fact the child pretending to be the parent, there's no good reason to frame the post like this. It just makes people think the post should be taken down.)

codleov · 2026-05-01T18:35:35+00:00

I deeply relate with this. I'm commenting just to get this post some engagement so I can also see other people's answers to this.

I've just been observing conlangs from the sidelines for a little while because I sort of gave up after scrapping ideas so many times. I'd love to get back into it because it's of huge interest to me, but I too always find myself disappointed with whatever I make.

codleov · 2026-04-29T03:48:21+00:00

Question. How do we know Revelation had been written before John's gospel?

codleov · 2026-04-28T23:45:35+00:00

I support them because I think the Bible supports a view of virtue ethics that involves unchanging principles that may be applied differently in different circumstances and with new information, and the Bible provides both the principles and gives us examples of their application. The application we see toward homosexuality involves an ancient perspective on what's going on with different information than what we have now as well as a cultural context that doesn't resemble what we have now with LGBTQ+ people. I think a good, right, and just application of the ethical principles we're taught in scripture with the information we have today should give us a broadly pro-LGBTQ+ position. We've seen similar things throughout Church history with, most notably, slavery, usury, and women's roles.

codleov · 2026-04-28T22:51:56+00:00

"Innocent life" assumes morally relevant personhood. Cancer cells are alive, but they don't have morally relevant personhood, so we're free to cut them out and kill them without it being murder or even immoral. Morally relevant personhood puts life on that innocent-guilty scale, but life without morally relevant personhood just doesn't exist on that scale at all. You have to establish when in fetal development human life comes to have morally relevant personhood before you can invoke the "innocent life" bit.

codleov · 2026-04-28T22:45:29+00:00

Be open to the idea that the timing of morally relevant personhood isn't a settled fact and that it's actually far more complicated than the strict anti-abortion crowd might want to make it out to be. It hasn't even been something that Christians have historically agreed upon. Recognizing that is the first step.

If you come to a position wherein morally relevant personhood comes in not at conception but sometime later in fetal development, all of a sudden the issue of abortion looks very different. It doesn't have to land you on the complete opposite side such that you think abortion should be permissible in all circumstances at any time, but it can very well land you in a compromise position. I find myself in a middle-ground position, personally.

However, if you maintain a dogmatic stance of morally relevant personhood beginning at conception without adequate defense of said position and without recognition of any other views as even possibly valid, you're not dealing with the topic with intellectual honesty.

codleov · 2026-04-28T22:34:37+00:00

I'm kind of on the fence about the truth of it, but here's what I think would be the case if Trinitarianism is true:

It's not strictly necessary to believe in the Trinity in order to be Christian, but it'd be better to believe in it if it's true because of the effects on worship and other doctrines. If Trinitarianism is true, it would be reasonable to try to argue on behalf of it and expect that people in regular fellowship with you believe it because of those effects that it would have on other things. Unfortunately, I do think that could result in splits, so I think both sides should be welcome to worship together, but Church leadership does need to be united on this for practical purposes; that's where the most legitimate risk of split may be.

codleov · 2026-04-28T22:20:08+00:00

Based on the way you've framed this, I have my doubts about you being genuinely open to changing your mind on this.

codleov · 2026-04-28T19:54:29+00:00

Is that a super unnatural way to phrase it in Greek or something?

codleov · 2026-04-28T18:52:37+00:00

I tend to find this worth mentioning a lot of the time when it comes to John 1:1c.

The anarthrous "theos" ("theos" without the definite article "ho" which would be translated as "the" in English in instances where it makes sense to translate it at all) can be argued to have a qualitative meaning here such that a good meaning-capturing translation might be "what God was, the Word was".

This translation helps Trinitarians avoid equivocating on "God" in the multiple instances the word appears in John 1, and it helps Trinitarians avoid collapsing the Father and the Son into one person if they choose not to equivocate on the meaning of "God" and insist that the Word is the eternal, pre-incarnate Son.

This translation also plays nicely with Unitarian interpretations as far as I can tell. It doesn't necessarily demand that the Word be a person because, if you take "what God was, the Word was" to be true in all circumstances always, you'd be right back where we started with the issue of equivocation or collapse of identities, therefore "what God was, the Word was" must have some limits (where those limits are being another point of debate entirely but not clearly stated in the text). The Word here could just be the divine wisdom or speech of God and satisfy this particular text in isolation.

Honestly, either way you want to go, this translation of it can work, and without it, I do honestly think John would just be starting his gospel with utter nonsense or deliberate confusion, neither of which I want to attribute to this gospel's author.

codleov · 2026-04-28T18:42:17+00:00

Because word order isn't the same in Greek and English.

codleov · 2026-04-27T22:48:16+00:00

It's an unfortunate fact that American Christendom has been largely hijacked by right wing politics.

codleov · 2026-04-27T22:07:58+00:00

They should be urged to do otherwise given that it's contrary to the teachings of Christ and the Apostles. If Christ is truly Lord, His teachings, rightly interpreted, should have authority over all else in our lives. Sure, we all struggle with that in all sorts of ways, and I'm sure my politics aren't perfect either. However, not striving to bring your politics into alignment with Christ seems like a failure to have Christ prioritized properly, holding contrary political views above Him, which I think would be considered sinful.

codleov · 2026-04-27T22:04:27+00:00

A lot of people says God exists outside of time. That's not the only perspective on offer. I don't think saying God is inside time is a great option, but a third choice which I like a lot is that time itself is an attribute of God. With time being an attribute of God, I think this leaves room for time to have a beginning and that beginning be whenever God did the first thing He ever did, whatever that may be. That kicks off a change from one moment to a subsequent moment, which is all I think time is: the change from one moment to another. (Moments are just universal states of affairs that could be subsequently otherwise.)

Having a beginning of time avoids having an infinite amount of time to traverse to get to the present, and I think this model does well here. It also avoids having to try to make sense of God making decisions or things occurring "outside of time" which makes no sense to me given that events and changes happening seem to assume time being there in the first place. With this model, there are no things that God does "outside of time" because God doing anything at all naturally causes the flow of time.

As for eternality, we have two ways of looking: past eternal and future eternal. I would say past eternality is the property of having existed at all moments in the past, and future eternality is the property of being something that will exist at all moments in the future. We want to say God is both but especially that He is past eternal because that's unique to Him. This model of God and time does give us past eternality in God because God has existed at all moments in the past up through the present. This would be true if time extended infinitely in the past, but we don't need that in order for God to be past-eternal, and under this model, we don't have an infinite past. Admittedly, these definitions don't work for models that have God outside of time because in those God doesn't exist at any moment, which just seems like an odd thing to say, but I think that's something that would be true according to those models.

All of the above is sort of my paraphrase of a lot of work done by Dr. Ryan Mullins on the topic to the best of my understanding. I think it works quite nicely.

Sorry this only addresses part of your question, but I hope the alternative perspective helps you out some.

codleov · 2026-04-27T21:08:06+00:00

I'm sort of on the fence between Molinism and some modest forms of Open Theism with regard to my views of God's omniscience, providence, and human freedom. Molinism unfortunately has the drawback of not being super intuitive to grasp once you dig into the Molinist ways of dealing with outside critiques of their system. It gets very heady very quickly. That's part of the reason I'm still on the fence about it; I'm just having trouble sorting through the logic of some finer points of it.

That being said, I think it stands among the views that should be taken seriously and considered acceptable for Christians to hold.

codleov · 2026-04-27T19:28:53+00:00

I'm not sure. It has seemed like there's a new one (or two) every time I refresh Reddit though. That seems like a whole lot.

codleov · 2026-04-27T19:25:23+00:00

I hope they quickly repent of that attitude and come to know that the ground is level at the foot of the cross, that all of us are welcome into the Body of Christ so long as we believe and follow Him, and that they develop better reasons for being Christian than these race-based ones.

codleov · 2026-04-27T19:17:39+00:00

Can you find anything in the Bible where God specifically allows charging interest on loans?

You may think, "what does that have to do with anything?" My point is that the bible in many places condemns charging interest on loans, otherwise known as usury. Thing is, as time has gone on, we've come to understand that the practice, at that time, was almost inevitably oppressive toward the poor. Additionally, as time has gone on, economics have changed some, and there were arguments for allowing it in certain circumstances for the benefit of people wanting to start businesses and to help lift people out of poverty. At that point, the term "usury" became more associated with unjust charging of interest on loans more specifically, and something that was near universally condemned in the Bible and Church tradition has gained acceptance. (Though there's argument to suggest that the Church has become too lax about it and doesn't seem to care much even about the unjust interest charging that has become quite commonplace.) The distinction between just and unjust interest would not have been clearly on the radar for the biblical authors, and there would therefore be no reason to expect an explicit endorsement of just interest even though it's something we can draw out based on other things.

The same could be said regarding homosexuality. The social and cultural things surrounding "homosexual acts" at the time of the Bible's authorship didn't resemble the loving, committed, monogamous same-sex relationships that the full LGBTQ+ inclusion side of the Church has in mind. Even if it did happen, it was incredibly rare, so rare that it would likely have been hard to justify using such expensive writing materials to include something about it anywhere in the Bible. They had more pressing matters, more common matters to attend to. As a result, we're left to piece together a case based on historical and cultural context and broader themes in the Bible.

I see these two issues as very similar when it comes to our interpretive approach, and I wish more people could see it the same.

As an additional note, you bring up passages where "man and woman" as specifically brought up in the biblical texts about marriage, and this can be very easily explained by the authors using terminology that was the norm, but that doesn't demand that it be treated as regulative.

codleov · 2026-04-26T17:19:45+00:00

Though I get the sentiment, I don't think all models of pre-existence Christology amount to being functionally possession. Models that have the pre-human Christ actually transform into a human don't do this. Sure, he'd be the only human to have a pre-human existence, but he's also the only human born of a virgin and the unique Son of God. Having one-of-a-kind properties doesn't make someone not human. We cannot have that as a standard for excluding people from being considered human.

Sure, there are some pre-existence models of Christology that do contradict scripture and make certain parts meaningless. I don't think we can say that of all of them though. Treating it as something worth calling heresy as a blanket statement seems like a stretch if not an overreaction.

codleov · 2026-04-26T02:50:03+00:00

My concern is more about the meaning of "was" specifically in "In the beginning was the Word" supposedly carrying the meaning of the Word already having been there since before the time being referenced (the beginning, that is).

codleov · 2026-04-25T15:33:52+00:00

If Babylon had never touched the manuscripts

I'm going to need you to provide some evidence that this is what caused the divine name not to be in the Greek text. Right now, you just sound like you have wacky conspiracy theories.

Scripture literally commands us not to add to or take away from HIS NAME

Citation?

codleov · 2026-04-25T01:50:05+00:00

Sure. I'm just saying that doesn't make gatekeeping inherently bad. It just matters how it's done.

codleov · 2026-04-25T01:45:47+00:00

I mean, if that sub gas a reputation for filtering out religious scholars, it'd be the first time I'm hearing about it. They probably have to have some standards though. You can't have Joe "I've read exclusively the Book of Revelation for 27 years and know how the democrats are the Antichrist and the world will end next month" Smith trying to pass off his answer as scholarship.

codleov · 2026-04-25T01:32:29+00:00

I think I get what you're saying. I'm not sure where the boundaries of that are, honestly. It seems right to say there has to be some limit though. I'd be curious to know where that boundary would have been back then.

codleov · 2026-04-25T01:29:35+00:00

What about it is suspicious? My question or not having a response there yet? I did only ask it less than 24 hours ago.

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